The cause of many diseases in the human cardiovascular arena remains unknown. Much of what is referred to diseases is in fact the symptoms of underlying cellular diseases. For example, what is referred to the disease of hypertension is only the symptom of an elevated blood pressure, which can be caused by many different pathologies, such as vasoconstriction or high cardiac output. Much of the focus of current therapies in medicine is directed to treatment of symptoms rather than the underlying cellular malfunctions. Some of the previous work of the current inventor with regard to cardiovascular disease is contained U.S. Pat. No. 5,650,418 to Rath, et al.
Among some of the most common diseases with unknown origins is irregular heart beat or arrhythmia. This is the case for both arrhythmias originating in the atrial region of the heart (atrial arrhythmias) as well as in the ventricular region. The latest edition of the leading textbook in cardiology, E. Braunwald's “The Heart” states that the etiology of arrhythmias remain unknown. It has been speculated that disturbances in the sodium and potassium channels of myocytes plays a role in arrhytmogenesis.
Since the underlying cellular causes of arrhythmias are largely unknown, pharmacological therapies remain unspecific. Current therapies include Beta blockers, Calcium antagosists, and other specific anti arrhythmic drugs. The goal of most of these treatments is directed towards prolonging the electrical conductivity of the heart cells that are responsible for the autonomous generation of a heart beat, in order to prevent irregularities in heart beat. Current treatments, in turn, are inevitably associated with the difficulty to titrate a proper therapeutic dosage of anti-arrhythmic drugs, resulting in abnormally extended electrical conduction time and pro-arrhytmogenic side-effects with well-known complications such as sudden death.
Worldwide over one hundred million people suffer from different forms of arrhythmias, and deaths occurred as a result of taking the currently available arrhythmia drugs reaches the tens of thousands. Arrythmias can lead to sudden death caused by an arrest of the cardiac muscle, which leads to a sudden stop in blood flow. Unlike other heart attacks caused by coronary heart disease and cholesterol occluded arteries, where emergency treatment has a reasonable chance of saving the patient from death, heart attacks caused by arrhythmia are seldom survived. Furthermore, while coronary heart diseases such as atherosclorosis is seen in older humans, arrhythmias also occur in younger as well as older humans.
Thus there is an urgent need for a specific therapeutic approach to arrhythmias that is an alternative to current therapies.
There is also a need for a therapy for arrhythmia that is without the side effects generally associated with the conventional therapies currently available.